Frying strips of bacon has been one of the messiest of all kitchen chores. While cooking the bacon, grease often splatters onto the following items: stovetops, counter tops, kitchen floors, and persons cooking the bacon itself. The person may receive some severe discomfort from grease burns on the skin or eyes from the frying of the bacon. Furthermore, as is now the case, bacon is usually fried in a frying pan, the heat being applied directly to only one side of the bacon at a time. In this manner, much energy is wasted, escaping through the frying pan into the air and unduly heating the kitchen room. Also, when cooking bacon in the oven in a shallow flat baking sheet pan the same conditions also applies as to the heat is directly applied to only one side of the bacon at a time. With each different methods of cooking the bacon, oven or stovetop, the bacon strips are often over cooked on one side than on the other and also comes out greasy because the bacon is held in the grease that normally cooks out of the bacon. Another drawback in cooking bacon in the oven or stovetop methods is that the bacon strips tend to significantly crinkle or shrink which often makes the bacon look very unappealing and tastes over-cooked.
Generally, as strips of bacon are cooked, the bacon has a tendency to shrink in size, to curl and to soak up a considerable amount of the grease in which is produced by the bacon itself during cooking. Additionally, if several pieces of bacon are cooked together, there is a tendency for the pieces to cling together if not kept separate. The use of oven cooking is the prefer method of cooking bacon, but has little to overcome the problems of shrinkage, curing, sticking together and fat grease absorption.
It would be advantageous to have an apparatus to assist in uniformly and efficiently cooking strips of bacon with minimum of mess and inconvenience; to hold strips of bacon so they may be cooked on both sides simultaneously; that allows grease to drain from the bacon while it is cooking, providing substantially less greasy cooked bacon; to reduce the shrinkage and absorption of grease by strips of bacon during the cooking of the bacon in an oven; to support the strips of bacon in an elevated parallel vertically oriented array while the bacon is being cooked; and/or to cook bacon without the need for constant turning over the strip of bacon when cooking in an oven.